Understanding the feedback curve or why people don’t listen to feedback
How to spot if your feedback mechanisms are useful or simply a rubber stamping exercise
Ever wondered why review processes become so painful for everyone involved. I remember talking to a distinguished engineer at one company who was bemoaning the fact that people were complaining about the engineering review process. In the same company I had more junior engineers who were afraid of putting their project forward for review. When reviews happened the feedback given wasn’t adopted. Which begged the question: why are we doing this? Surely, if feedback wasn’t being taken on board from senior engineers then we were wasting everyone’s time.
On the surface everyone could see why we were doing it. Getting feedback from people who may have walked this path before should, in theory, prevent us from making future mistakes and enable us to build better projects. Sharing information should enable teams to know what each other was working on and to align together better. Yet, none of these things were happening. The people we needed feedback from were getting grumpy and the people asking for feedback were afraid to participate in it. It had turned into an expensive rubber stamping exercise that brought no value.
